Overview
Rachel Horner (she/her) is a PhD candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University. She holds an MA in musicology and a BM in vocal music education and Spanish from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Rachel’s research investigates the intersections between sound, language, and identity, especially in the context of Spanish and Latin American cultural festivals. Her dissertation project builds on six years of ethnographic fieldwork with musicians, pyrotechnicians, festival participants, and other cultural stakeholders in the Falles Festival of València, Spain. It centers three core domains of sound—language, noise, and music—to reveal how sound acts as a mode of preservation despite its rapid disappearance, generating an intangible archive of behaviors, feelings, and beliefs within and beyond the festival. Rachel is editorial assistant of the quarterly journal American Music and is the assistant director of Cornell Writing Centers.
